The great map update of 2012

Eric Gelinas

6 years ago

Today we are announcing an update to the map tiles which we use site wide. A very high majority of the globe will be represented by Nokia’s clever looking tiles.

We are not stopping there. As some of you may know, Flickr has been using Open Street Maps (OSM) data to make map tiles for some places. We started with Beijing and the list has grown to twenty one additional places:

Mogadishu
Cairo
Algiers
Kiev
Tokyo
Tehran

Hanoi
Ho Chi Minh City
Manila
Davao
Cebu
Baghdad

Kabul
Accra
Hispaniola
Havana
Kinshasa
Harare

Nairobi
Buenos aires
Santiago

It has been a while since we last updated our OSM tiles. Since 2009, the OSM community has advanced quite a bit in the tools they provide and data quality. I went into a little detail about this in a talk I gave last year.

Introducing Pandonia

Today we are launching Buenos Aires and Santiago in a new style. We will be launching more cities in this new style in the near future. They are built from more recent OSM data and they will also have an entirely new style which we call Pandonia. Our new style was designed in TileMill from the osm-bright template, both created by the rad team at MapBox. TileMill changes the game when it comes to styling map tiles. The interface is developed to let you quickly iterate style changes to tiles and see the changes immediately. Ross Harmes will be writing a more detailed account of the work he did to create the Pandonia style. We appreciate the tips and guidance from Eric Gunderson, Tom MacWright, and the rest of the team at MapBox

We are looking forward to updating all of our OSM places with the Pandonia style in the near future and growing to more places after that… Antarctica? Null Island? The Moon? Stay tuned and see…

Changing our Javascript API

To host all of these new tiles we needed to find a flexible javascript api. Cloudmade’s Leaflet is a simple and open source tile serving javascript library. The events and methods map well to our previous JS API, which made upgrading simple for us. All of our existing map interfaces will stay the same with the addition of modern map tiles. They will also support touch screen devices better than ever. Leaflet’s layers mechanism will make it easier for us to blend different tile sources together seamlessly. We have a fork on GitHub which we plan to contribute to as time goes on. We’ll keep you posted.